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Here's a New Way to Fame: Just Paint Yourself into a Big Corner

Even in Hollywood, the Town that Hype Built, the freshly painted mural on the side of the Hollywood Plaza apartment building marks the apogee of mondo ego publicity. Three elements make the portrait a standout: its size (85’x44′), its content (the image of a woman who’s about to explode out of her Spandex) and its utter lack of raison d’être. There is no product to advertise because its subject—a would-be celebrity named Angelyne—has never done anything. Untalented by her own admission, Angelyne, 28, has nothing to offer but her inflated, billboard-size image. “I’m the first person in the history of this town,” she says, quite inaccurately, “to become famous for nothing.”

A trifling goal perhaps, but at least she’s making an effort to live up to historian Daniel J. Boorstin’s definition of a celebrity: a person known for his well-knownness. Angelyne’s torridly tacky mural is part of a six-year master plan that she and her manager initiated in 1981 simply to make her well-known. She started as a poster girl for a band, graduated to her own billboards in 1981 (one can be seen in Moonlighting’s opening credits) and has now reached the crowning achievement of her non-career—the $22,000 painting that has car brakes screeching at the nearby intersection of Hollywood and Vine. “She’s more than a personality, she’s an institution,” hyperbolizes her manager, Hugo Maisnik, 60, an advertising executive who underwrites Angelyne’s escapades and maintains a “strictly business” relationship with her. “She can get people to do anything. She could end wars. Or start them.”

Though no one has called the United Nations, and her résumé notwithstanding, Angelyne insists the master plan is working. “I can feel myself getting more and more famous every day.”

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